Within the complex environment of higher education, administrators and faculty members face daunting challenges in their unique domains of institutional governance. A few of the greatest challenges arise from basic misunderstandings of authority and its limitations by administrators and faculty members alike. These misunderstandings are the main source of disruptive confusion, mistrust, and mismanagement. In consequence, an institution’s governance would reinforce significantly if its team of workers clearly take into account the fundamental principles of authority. To bring about this improvement, Understanding Authority in Higher Education clarifies issues of authority in an academic setting. All the way through, it introduces basic concepts of higher-education administration and then examines the limits of authority in context. Pedagogically, the book strives regularly to ascertain whether authority is used properly from a legal standpoint, emphasizing the influence of academic cultural norms on legal principles and vice versa. But, Understanding Authority in Higher Education goes further than law textbooks by the usage of real and anecdotal case studies to examine aspects of authority that don’t appear in court proceedings — those that lie beyond the reach of the law. In these cases, the book explores the anthropology — the behavior and the culture — of authority in the academic environment.